Buying your own grazing land?.........

[rummi]

Sadly, the future at our yard looks more and more uncertain. Our YO and his wife are in their early 80's and for the last 5 years or so, us 'long-timers' at the yard have worried about what would happen if they decided to retire/downsize/move away etc.

We are very lucky, in that our YO is very accomadating, and the yard is VERY DIY, in that we can leave our horses out 24/7 all year round, and he even lets me have grass livery for £12 per horse per week (everyone else has to pay £20 to include a stable!). We have a jumping paddock, a scholling paddock (both grass), 30 stablesa small tack room, storage areas, hardstanding, hay barn, electric/water and decent hacking.

I have been there for over 10 years, and have been rather spoilt in the last few years in having my own 2.5 acre field that I can do with as I please. It now includes a fenced off schooling area (grass in normal schooling paddock if too high and lush and Bailey is rather distracted!), track system around the outside and I have fenced the perimeter of the field in post and electric fencing. It has natural shelter on 3 sides and direct access to the road. I have spent over £800 on fencing.

I also have my own locked store room that is probably 10ftx15ft.

Sadly, our YO is very ill and he has now gone into a hospice. It is very sad although we have all known he has been seriously ill over the last year or so, but most of us haven't known any details. I do feel bad to be thinking of myself at this time, but please understand this has been a looming future for all of us at the yard for the last few years, its just far more likely now that the yard may not continue in the same form much longer.....

The YO's family all live abroad, so we assume no-one in the family will be taking the farm on. Two liveries ( a couple) that have been on the yard for over 20 years, have been taking over the day-to-day running of the yard for the last year or so, particularly the husband. Unfortunately, they are both around retirement age, so i doubt they would want (or be able) to take the business on.

Luckily, the yard is in a VERY restricted protected greenbelt area, so the council basically don't allow ANY building in the area! At least this means that no developers will buy the land. In all, I reckon the YO has around 50-60 acres in this location, and has another local yard with around 20 acres. I wonder if the YO's wife will carry on the business, with the liveries couple running it all, or if she'll decide to sell up either the yard/land and keep her farmhouse, or sell up both? Either way, at her age, it will probably be sold at SOME point.

I'm wondering if it would be feasible to buy my little 2.5 acre field? For now, I'll ride it out and see what happens, but if the yard were put up for sale, either as a whole lot, or parts, I was wondering how possible it would be to make an offer for my plot?

I am very lucky that we got our mortgage for our house 10 years ago, when it cost half of what it does now, so our monthly mortgage is quite low. However, I have NO idea what would be the going rate for a 2.5 acre field would be (I'll probably be horrified!). I currently pay £104/month livery, and assume that if I tried to rent a 2.5 acres field somewhere, it would be more than this?

I would guess that I would have to give up access to haybarn, yard, store room etc but that can be worked around. I could easily tie up and tack-up/ride out from the field.

I also wonder how it would work with my water supply costs (one trough), and the fact that my electric fence is currently hooked to the mains (but I could go back to a battery).

This is all 'pie in the sky' but it is something that has concerned us for several years, and seems to be more and more likely that the yard may be sold in the near future. Any experiences?

[megansmum]

I am sorry to hear your story I went through the same stuff this year very upsetting I too would have liked to buy some of the land but it went for such a lot of money thankfully it was bought by some lovely people plus a preservation trust so I am still renting the land for now anyway' where abouts in the country are you' the cost of grazing land is very high and you are lucky to have been able to rent it for a good price' I will keep you in my thoughts'

[rummi]

I'm down in the south of Hampshire.

I think the main worry is if they put it up for sale, there'd be 30+ horses needing to find somewhere else locally!

I think we all hope someone would take on the yard and carry on as it is, but I couldn't cope with a new YO adding extra horses to my field, or telling me I have to stable them overnight, or taking down my track system. I'm FAR too used to doing things my way now.

I can see that if it gets put up for sale, people will jump ship very quickly for fear of having nowhere to keep their horses.

[Lana]

Hi, We found ourselves in virtually the same situation about 10 yrs ago.
We'd been on DIY (very DIY) livery at a yard for about 15 yrs when the owners sold off almost all the land and kept on just a few of the longstanding liveries, but we knew that was just a temporary measure. Luckily we came into enough money to buy 4 stables and 4 acres which we increased to 6 and 6 a couple of years ago, but I don't know what we would have done if we couldn't have bought our own as we had a couple of stallions.
It is really the best thing we've ever done, but as you know land is very expensive especially here in the South. Our land is worth about 4 times what we paid for it
If you can find somewhere suitable to buy and that is a big if in this area, I'd say go for it, good luck
ETA We're in the South of Hampshire too, didn't realise it wasn't in my profile.

[heather]

Even here in S Devon, small parcels of Horse grazing land fetch £10- 12000 an acre . With buildings, still more. A 2.5 acre paddock with stabling and storage, water and electricity would be at least £30,000 here.

Heather

[sunnylynn11]

I'd love to have the chance of buying my own couple of acres. Land here in Essex is approx £25K+ per acre and is also as rare as rocking horse poo

[pip]

Small plots of grazing land up around £10,000 per acre. The trouble is that there are quite a lot of people who can afford to pay up to around £40,000 (borrow and pay the interest), it is when you get up into larger acreages the price per acre drops, but there always seem to be some people around who come forward and buy, no matter how many 00000s there are on the end.

The only thing to do is to wait until something happens, and hopefully you would have some notice if they were going to sell, and have someone come and look at it and suggest a price you could offer and hope that they would accept it. You would have to work out access, water, etc. as well. Find out FIRST how much a water connection would be.

[aero]

Have you thought of approaching the current YO to see if she would consider selling you your little field. You might want to think about access though, is it along a shared driveway ..... if you can buy it now you could ensure that access rights are granted before a new owner is in place as some people don't like others having access along their lane/driveway. The field next to ours was sold last year and a few people were not happy to buy it when they realised that we had access rights for equestrian and agricultural purposes. Our driveway narrows as it passes our barn and anything bigger than a long wheelbase transit can't get through but the farmer was quite happy to allow access rights through the adjoining field in case we needed to get a larger vehicle onto the field. We bought 2 acres at first and then when we found out that he was going to sell the rest of it and the one next to it, we bought the remainer of our field about 3 months before he put the adjoining field for sale fortunately, as the new owners are not too keen that the rights were written into our contract. Once they realised that they legally couldn't alter it, they have accepted it, albeit reluctantly, with good grace.... so it just might be worth asking, she can only say yes or no, but if she agrees it could be easier than waiting until the whole parcel of what she owns goes on the market. Just a thought.

[portiabuzz]

i would ask the YO personally.....good luck!!